History with style: the impassible writing of Flaubert - Gustave Flaubert

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jed Deppman

The excess of their distress took from them the strength to curse the accused; but they all hated him, judging that he had cheated them of debauchery, of honors, of celebrity status, of genius, sometimes of more undefinable chimeras, of that which, since childhood, each one harbored profoundly and sweetly in the particular foolishness of his own dream.

What Proust has rendered here is precisely the impassible stylistic difficulty of Flaubert that I want to highlight.(7) These lines, which end the pastiche, are brilliant because they are ambiguously ironic: they give us a narrator who is both close to and far from the spectators' consciousness, a narrator who refuses to provide, or, better, to preclude, any interpretive modalities. A text that at first might seem to be a Juvenalian, or at least a Horatian, satire, but certainly a satire of some kind, in the end finds itself destabilized by the "profound and the sweet." It is hard to read l'affaire Lemoine as a satire, unrelentingly attacking either the crowd or the accused, for the contextualizing childhood dream softens and complicates the ignorant bitterness of the crowd. Because we have been distanced from and then brought near to them, we can neither simply identify with nor cleanly break from the crowd experience. Proust copies this complexifying gesture, the impassible par excellence, from Flaubert, who, as we will see, never clinches but only complexifies. The free indirect style that Proust gives his Flaubert thus renders the Flaubertian refusal to foreclose modality.

The line of Proust's pastiche cited above recalls those of Flaubert that put the reader to the guess even as they promise interpretive closure. Scattered throughout Flaubert's works, such phrases are stylistically singular in that they call for interpretation through heightened drama and the tropes of causality and certitude and then complexify rather than clinch. This technique of impassibility is most often achieved through the fluctuation, within any given text, of the powers accorded to the free indirect style: at times the narrator is privy to innermost thoughts and at other times excluded. When Emma and Leon enter the fiacre in Rouen, for example, the narrator suddenly loses access to their thoughts (Bovary 279-80). Another form of this technique is the peculiarly Flaubertian use of "sans doute" phrases - ambiguous phrases such as, in English, "no doubt," "probably" or even "perhaps" - to suggest that the narrator, too, is guessing at the characters' thoughts: "Emma, sans doute, ne remarquait pas ses empressements silencieux ni ses timidites" (Emma, probably, didn't notice his silent advances or his timidities) (Bovary 249). Another common Flaubertian technique is the use of a vocabulary in the free indirect style that does not belong to the experience of the character: Felicite's medical vocabulary in the final pages of Un coeur simple, for example, or the stylized literary rhetoric of pure symbols "in" Salammbo's thoughts. Similarly, the summoning use of irony in free indirect style often forces the "thoughts of the character" away from the narrator, drawing attention to the distance between them and making us question the reliability and interestedness of the narration in general. Recall, for example, the humorous early description of Frederic Moreau: "Il trouvait que le bonheur merite par l'excellence de son ame tardait a venir" (He thought that the happiness he deserved due to the excellence of his soul was late in coming) (L'Education 10). Stylistically these moments attract enough attention to cause us doubt: are we really to believe that Frederic thinks to himself - in these terms! - that his excellent soul should already have produced happiness? The image is one of a boy confident that he has been good all year looking around for happiness as if it were a hidden Christmas gift. Moments like these - straight narration combined with critical comment infuse Flaubert's narratives with doubt and open them up to difficulties of interpretation.